I was in the neighbourhood yesterday and noticed that rubbish had been dumped on Waldeck and Crescent Road. As we identified in the last two sessions, dumping/fly tipping is clearly a considerable problem in the area. Perhaps you could give some thought over the next few days as to how you might “design out” this problem through the DIY Streets initiative. Some resources are available on our website here, but this is also an opportunity to let your imaginations run and come up with some innovative solutions. We will then be able to give these ideas consideration at our design meeting on Saturday 23rd October.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was coming to the DIY Streets Meeting at Christchurch, I saw, from a distance, a young woman leave her house in Langham Road carrying a large blue sac of rubbish. She walked round the corner to Stanmore Road, dumped the bag on the pavement and returned home. I immediately went to her house and politely told her that she should put all such rubbish in her wheely-bin. I then asked her to go back to Stanmore Road and bring the rubbish back to her house. I said that I would be coming back later and would check. An hour or so later when I passed her house again, I noticed that she had retrieved the sack and had put it by her wheely bin.

The moral of this story is that dumping cannot be ‘designed out’ but it can be ‘educated out’. The young woman in question was a recent arrival to England. Her landlord clearly had made no effort to explain to her the procedure for disposing of different types of rubbish. She had observed that when people leave rubbish in bags on the street they are eventually taken away, so, in her eyes, she was behaving quite “normally” until I explained otherwise.